petite cote

Middle English peticote came from Anglo-Norman petite cote — literally 'small coat.' In the fifteenth century, a petticoat was a short garment worn by men under their doublets. It was an undergarment for the male torso, padded and practical. The 'small coat' was small relative to the outer coat. There was nothing feminine about the word or the garment.

By the sixteenth century, the word had migrated to women's clothing. A petticoat became an underskirt — a garment worn beneath the outer skirt to add volume, warmth, and modesty. The transition from men's undertunic to women's underskirt is not fully documented, but by Elizabeth I's reign, petticoat was firmly feminine. The word had jumped from the male torso to the female lower body in roughly a century.

Petticoats multiplied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Women wore multiple petticoats for volume, warmth, and structure. A fashionable woman might wear five or six at once. The crinoline cage of the 1850s eventually replaced the need for multiple petticoats, but the word persisted. 'Petticoat government' became a phrase for female influence in politics. 'Petticoat Lane' in London was a market named, according to legend, for the second-hand clothing sold there.

The petticoat declined with twentieth-century fashion. As skirts shortened and fabrics clung, the volume-adding underskirt became unnecessary. Slips — simpler, thinner — replaced petticoats for most purposes. The word survives in square dancing (where full petticoats are standard), in period costume, and in the phrase 'petticoat junction' — a 1960s television show named for a cultural artifact already fading from daily life.